Tuesday, February 28, 2017

In theory it never rains in Southern California but nobody has been singing that song this year and we didn't sing it Sunday either. So we all hung at the house and then headed off to a San Diego Sockers game in the evening with the usual result.

Normally anything left on the ground, at any time, any where, Kobae will eat it. So everything had to be moved to the front floorboard and seat. Things were packed so high that when I was finally able to put Jax's bed in there he had a great view of the drive. As the drink holder was long since buried my boot served as the replacement.

With the second 12 hour straight through drive in four days I had to pull over a couple times and get an hour or two here and there. One nice place was Spotted Wolf Canyon not far from Green River.

At 1:30pm Monday Kobae returns to Base Camp.

There was a package waiting and when I opened it, was the magnetic bookmarks I had made with his picture on it and a little bio on the back.

Saturday, February 25, 2017

Today Kobae chased Jax for a couple hours and Kobae was full speed for much of it. Jax has adapted to having a large shadow follow him wherever he goes and I feel a bit sorry for him being called in every direction to try and control the direction that Kobae is going. First, when Jax takes a pee, he overcompensates for covering it up by quite a bit as the first video amply demonstrates. Second, Kobae was on fire chasing Jax and he was as mad as I've seen him. Jax tried to get a lead on him so he could drop a load but Kobae got there while the event was still in progress. Jax is trying to squeeze his butt cheeks closed and run but he can't because his cheeks still have company that hasn't finished it's departure. That's as tactfully as I can describe it. Then there's some other stuff.

In April of 1988 I bought a tennis club on top of a water reservoir in North Park a couple of miles from downtown San Diego. I paid $300,000 for it. Originally it had 11 tennis courts. I took four courts out to build an indoor (outside) soccer field. In time I took out more courts to build a second field. As a tennis facility the place did about $40,000 a year. I ran the place several times between managers and I probably spent more time at this facility than any other one. Linda ran the tennis club during the day and did the books plus all the kids worked there when they were still very young. The hours were brutally long and it was a tough neighborhood. I made peace with the local gangs and let them each put an Under 19 team in of which I coached to not get graffiti. Breakends were frequent and I slept there many a time having physical contact several times with burglars. The hookers and homeless people were the biggest problem with the hookers doing business in the bushes around the one square block facility and the homeless sleeping across the street in the park trying to sneak in and take showers. For many years it was a battle.

Almost thirty years ago I coached my daughter Heather at this facility in the Girls Under 10 league. Today I visited the facility to watch my daughter Heather, her daughter Tatiana, play in the Under 6 league.

The neighborhood is mostly cleaned up now and being revitalized. Over all it looks pretty nice. The facility has four fields now and a futsal practice area. Tatiana's team is one of 500 plus teams that play here.

Sometimes, when you want to go hiking, and Kobae doesn't, though you can't leave him alone on the front porch, all you need is a dog for bait. Rachel pretty much has it perfected using Elsie as bait. In San Diego, where it's a little more difficult because of lots of dogs, people, and traffic I used the same technique and it went pretty well. We crossed a four lane without people having to wait very long, I was able to multi-task by reading, videoing, walking the dog, and tortoise, and doing tutorials for those that came across us.

Wednesday, February 22, 2017

Alf, Jax, and I visit the Canyonlands Overlook. The wind was so fierce we all had to lay down a couple times to keep from getting knocked over and Jax who I thought was going to get blown over the side provided potential heart attack moments one after the other.

Sunday, February 19, 2017

So far this winter we've had exactly two snows and both melted by the next day. I suspect partly at least because of the good weather we've had several bookings in January and February where normally there are none. It turns out there was a demand for something like Last Hurrah. Including Last Hurrah currently there are three times the bookings there were all of last year and already there are more scheduled stays this year than room nights that were rented in all of 2016.